Early this past June I authored an ACM paper to submit to a conference, created and organized by two of my former professors Alessandro Canossa and Casper Harteveld, FDG 2017. Although I was gracefully rejected, I was quite happy. In fact thinking back to June 14th, 2017 (the day before the submission deadline) I was […]

Problem When trying to clear a broken wall, we found that if you messed up once, you would often get stuck in a loop of hitting the wall until you died. Was this because the player resumed moving too soon after getting up? Or because the jump doesn’t “trigger” quickly enough after recovering? Are broken […]

What We Needed Emissive Text For Note: Skip this section if you’re only here to read about the emissive text One of the biggest challenges we’ve faced during beta development is quite simple: explaining to players what they have to do. The concept of collecting a minimum number of StratoSpheres and handing them in at […]

Another week, another beta build! This week we: Did a complete overhaul of the level design for mazes 0 to 14. We didn’t enjoy the feeling of designing “tutorial mazes” then “regular mazes” We instead are trying to design a whole game rather than a segmented one, spreading out new mechanics and gameplay over many […]

Another week, another beta build! Below are some highlighted changes, complete list at the bottom. Diegetic UI We eliminated the unclear and clunky “boost meter” HUD and replaced it with a kick-ass power-pack on the player’s back. Drawing influence from Isaac’s quintessential diegetic UI in the Dead Space franchise, our pack gets brighter as the […]

Intro For our first title Sky Labyrinth, way back in August 2015 we planned for a minimum of 30 mazes (aka levels) for initial release. We’re sticking to that number (technically surpassing, if you count the 7 tutorial mazes). In order to significantly cut down on time spent manually designing levels and placing objects, we created a […]

Intro This is our object pooling in action: as the player is completes the 1st maze of the game the 3rd one begins pooling, which finishes right as the player lands in maze #2. Goal: This blog post aims to give a high level overview of not only the tech behind this pooling but the editor tools we […]

Today I finished a few bugfixes to the ARCS (AutoRunner Camera System). The first notable bug was originally reported by /u/iron_dinges (developer of Thrusterball!). The camera sometimes ended up being uncentered, after finding the cause (2 rotations in quick succession) I noticed a second subtle bug with how the ARCS interacted with our WallFlip mechanic. Double Rotate Bug – […]

Results – Before/After Static Results – Before/After Note: This seam was highly visible from within the Maze during play Note: Although not eliminated entirely, this seam blends far better and is not visible during play Steps First, our new fulltime artist created a custom material for the Containment Field. Previously, we had been using a […]